How does economic growth affect the distribution of wealth? Combining wealth records from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and local GDP growth across 401 German counties, this paper documents a sizable Hometown-Growth-Wealth Nexus. Using a standard OLG model to guide our estimation strategy, we nd that, because of hometown growth, a person born in flourishing Munich will have accumulated two to three ...
By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20% of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical life-cycle model, this paper examines the persistent consequences of the war for individual wealth across generations. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the levels of wartime destruction in 1739 West German cities with micro data on individual ...
This paper analyses trends in mortality inequality in 330 Chilean communes from 1990 to 2010 for different age groups and both genders. Chile had substantial inequalities in local-level mortality rates in 1990 but by 2010 these disparities had significantly decreased, especially among infants, children and the elderly. The only exception was Chilean men aged 20–39, for whom inequality in mortality ...
On average, mothers and fathers in Germany divide paid work and care work very unequally. Mothers often only work part time, which results in further gender inequalities in the labor market. A current analysis of data from the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA) shows that the population’s attitudes toward the ideal division of work between couples with children under 12 are considerably more ...
This paper estimates the causal effect of increased availability of early childcare on maternal health. We focus on a substantial expansion of childcare for children under three years in West Germany from 2006 to 2019. By matching county-level childcare attendance rates with individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we are able to quantify the effects of this expansion on maternal ...
By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20 percent of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical lifecycle model of wealth accumulation, this paper examines the extent to which regional differences in destruction can explain differences in wealth today” – at the beginning of the 21st century. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the ...
Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse’s career or the other’s. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. We first conduct an event-study analysis of couples moving across commuting zones and find that relocation increases men’s earnings more than women’s, with strikingly similar patterns in Germany and Sweden. Using a sample of mass layoff...
The debate on the effects of child care policies on household and individual behavior is substantial but lacks a discussion of the unintended consequences of rising wages in the child care work sector. To address this gap in the debate, the relation between rising pay and formal child care hours, informal child care hours, and employment hours is analyzed empirically with a case study on child care ...